I truly enjoyed last week’s The Onion, which ran a piece entitled,
“Jesus, this week.” It was just
what the psychiatrist ordered. So on-point
was this piece, the title alone was Pulitzer-worthy. Check out the link: http://www.theonion.com/articles/jesus-this-week,32105/
Beyond the Boston Marathon attacks where
my daughter-in-law cheered on four workmates at the finish line hours before
the bombings…beyond the Thursday FBI photo-release of bomb-suspects and that
evening’s ambush of MIT Policeman Sean Collier… beyond the “Shelter In Place”
ordered in Watertown and Cambridge where both of my sons and their fiancées
live … beyond all of this was the ongoing journey of our favorite myeloma hero
and my personal spousal unit, enjoying a neural-reaction to a new medicine.
It’s times like these that I find the
human psyche impressive. My
personal psyche likes to play a game called, “Which horror shall we focus on
now? We can only do one at a time.
Choose wisely.”
By Tuesday, 24 hours post-bombings,
he’d enjoyed a similar number of hours on a new medicine designed to combat nerve
pain from myeloma therapies.
But instead of racing to his nerve
endings, the drug coiled its way inside a piece of brain tissue responsible for
generating incorrect emotions. Specifically, emotions wildly disconnected to
events unfolding around him.
Oh, he was concerned for his
daughter-in-law, his sons, a ski mate that ran in the Marathon. But alongside
these concerns rested an uncharacteristically euphoric expectation that his
upcoming myeloma blood test would reveal a long-awaited remission. There was no
real reason to believe this miracle was en route. But his emotion-generator was busy generating manic
optimism. He even phoned to request his test results early, only to learn he,
in fact, was NOT yet in remission.
This went over… poorly.
The guy is genuinely happy and stable,
so – between watching the news to ensure my children’s safety (a ridiculous but
essential exercise in magical thinking) I researched his medication. What was
my un-surprise to discover this drug caused mood-changes.
My handicapped focus continued to ping-pong between terrorist-updates and Jonathan’s mind-set, between follow-up emails
about a family bridal shower thrown the eve of the Marathon, and emails from a
realtor alerting us that a buyer wanted to buy – then not buy – then buy a
piece of property my husband’s family was selling.
By Wednesday, I was addled.
This happened to be the day Jonathan’s
drug-enhanced emotion-generator went into a new mode. His neural tissue now
viewed his unchanged myeloma marker-number as a harbinger of stable disease… about
which he was ringing peals of personal thanksgiving.
I was busy opening personal bottles
of leftover bridal shower wine.
Wednesday was not one of my
finer-moment days.
Thursday wasn’t lots better, given
that a member of his oncology team called his cell phone at dinnertime to
confess that he had – and I am not making this up – “forgotten” to order his
cancer medication.
Normally it
arrives each month on a Thursday or Friday and I sign for it in person. It
arrives in a plain brown wrapper, causing my neighbors speculative envy.
I realized there had been no such
plain brown-wrapper delivery that day.
And I was curious to know which way this news would spin inside his
emotion-generator.
He could not have been more PLEASED
to get to drive to Boston the next day to acquire those meds. He hung up as
excited as someone who’d learned they’d won the lottery and got to drive to
Boston to embark on a ten week cruise to paradise.
"How inconvenient might it be, Mr. Given, for you to
drive to Boston Friday to get your cancer medication in person?
Otherwise, it's not going to arrive until next Tuesday at your home, so
you'd miss four days' doses. . . "
“Why, it would be my pleasure to
drive to Boston tomorrow. I’m en
route to New Hampshire anyway on some personal real estate business. See you then!”
Why not?
Watertown wasn't yet under siege, nor
on lockdown; the MIT policeman was four hours from being murdered; the
radicalized bomb brothers were not yet minus one bomber in a shootout a few neighborhoods
away from the home of our son.
Therefore, it was not spectacularly
horrid when my husband’s work called, noting he had to delay his trip to New
Hampshire and to Boston for his medicine.
There was a small work crisis afoot.
This was news of monumental good
fortune! “Great! Now I can get some work done in Natick,
go to Beantown and get my Revlimid, come back here to meet you and we can pack
up for an afternoon ride. This is working out WONDERFULLY!” He fairly skipped to bed. Friday was going to be fun, fun, fun.
Was
It
Ever.
I had insomnia from real estate
insanity co-mingled with terrorist thoughts, so I was awake when the
MIT shooting broke on the news – and even more awake when Watertown was placed on
lockdown in the wee hours.
It’s the town my son Zach and his
fiancee Marina live in, so I am texting them both – before sunrise – then texting
Jake and his Alexandra who live in Cambridge. Also on lockdown. I alerted our third son in Canada
just so he could know everyone was safe.
And off Jonathan went in high spirits
to his work crisis and his journey into Boston to get his Revlimid.
“But babe,” said I to him, “it seems
that maybe everything is on lock-down in Boston.”
“Oh they can’t lock down
hospitals. Everything will be
FINE.”
It appears that hospitals are the
first places that are locked down. Which Jonathan confirmed late morning. He called to tell me they are having
his medicine mailed out. “It will arrive next Tuesday. I’ll only miss a
few days’ doses so DON’T … You… Worry.”
Oh
My
Gawd.
It is not possible to argue with Happy
Neural Tissue.
I instead went into Execute Mode and rummaged through a
special cabinet near my spices reserved for Leftover Medicines. I save them for special occasions.
Guess what I found?
Enough of his Revlimid medication to
get him through Tuesday in the correct dosage. It was left over from a January prescribing-misadventure.
Now this stuff is a relative of
Thalidomide, so it requires special handling and storage. I confess I didn’t
exactly ‘store it’ appropriately in triple wrapped latex-free Hazmat
coverings. It was in its plastic
bottle right next to my oregano.
I’d have called to tell him all of this, but feared the joy
he’d experience might cause him to drive into a tree.
So I distracted myself with plans my
sister-in-law and I were making to share meal-preparation for Friday, Saturday
and Sunday up in New Hampshire where we’d all convene to prep the property for
sale. I agreed to “make something yummy.”
But with Watertown, Cambridge and all
of Boston locked down and a manhunt afoot – I couldn’t tear myself from the TV
to go buy ingredients.
By noon it was clear all of the
fast-breaking action was neither fast, nor breaking, nor active. So
I left the TV room to scour pantry shelves for ingredients, hoping for the same
success I’d had unearthing cancer medicine.
I swiftly built a casserole from the
only ingredients I could find: five blocks of pre-expired cheese, two boxes of
pasta, half a curling zuccini, soy milk, and a hologram of swiss chard SO
translucent from age, I almost missed it while reaching for a shallot.
I began assembling the ingredients
hoping the Culinary Muses would inspire wizardry, and voila: I built a casserole to which I added
half a can of Pantene … no wait … Progresso-brand Lentil Soup. It was so amazing I am sharing the
non-recipe:
Lockdown Casserole
Take a box of tri-color rotini, whole wheat rotini or any pasta
in your cabinet and toss it in boiling water until it is pre al dente.
While the pasta roils away, into a microwave-safe vat toss
generic Velveeta, soy milk, aged cheddar, horseradish cheddar, American sandwich
cheese and mozzarella (*or pre-green
cheese your particular refrigerator harbors.) Microwave for as long as it takes to melt – which is way
long – so you should stick a spoon in there and give it a good stir to keep
apprised of its melt-status.
Drain the pasta and stick in a bucket.
Pour the runny cheese mess over the pasta and stir until your
biceps seize. Finish with a half-can of either Pantene-brand Lentil Soup or
Progresso. Both work well.
In separate bowl, snip an old shallot with scissors, use the
same scissors on withering swiss chard, and use a knife to dice a flaccid
zuccini-remnant. Toss them in
seasoned rice vinegar and citrus soy sauce, then fold the whole mess into the
Bicep Pasta.
Finish with parsley or anything green, unless it comes from a
darkened Rubbermaid vessel.
There you have it: a casserole made of things in my house
on a day I could not leave it.
It was fucking delicious.
While I have your attention, I’d like
to discuss the eff-word for a moment.
It’s “The Word” teachers vow never to use but they break that vow daily.
Anyway. I would like to ask … now that the remaining bomb-brother has been extracted from a boat on property
less than a mile from my kid’s home … I want to know … what kind of oncology
personnel forgets to order life-saving cancer medication, causing the patient to
have to drive into Boston the day he is to start his treatment – except – oops
– the whole city is on effing lockdown?
If you choose oncology as your life’s
passion, you just do not GET to be human and ‘forget’ to order cancer
medicines.
It is just lucky that Carolyn saves leftover
drugs.
I vow to continue to horde every expired antibiotic, sedative and opioid capsule, every ozone-defiling inhaler, every over-the-counter cold elixir
containing phenylpropanolamine – an ingredient pulled from the market years ago
and I’m never giving mine up. I’m not tossing the used nasal saline nor nasal
steroids whose applicators teem with plague spores of random-guests whose nostrils
I stuck em in when they arrived at my home complaining of colds and flu.
I’m a giver.
Jonathan arrived home that Friday
afternoon, much less elated about things like the sunrise and the fact that his
car started.
He was returning to Neural Ground
Control.
Phew.
So I felt comfortable sharing my day.
“Since I was unable to extract myself
from the TV, I used every viable house-ingredient and built tonight’s dinner, then I
went to the pizza place and got us wraps for the ride to New Hampshire. I gas’d up the car and deposited money
in the bank and guess what? I can
no longer tell you what our balance is. Instead of a deposit slip revealing our
balance, I got a receipt.
Like the kind that rolls out of a cash-register only flimsier. It started
to compost itself once it came in contact with my skin, but not before it
informed me that I had – get this -- just deposited money… then had taken some
out. THEN, the receipt instructed me to go a computer somewhere to
establish a password and securely read my balance. The only way we’ll ever know how much we have in the bank is
if we close out the account.”
“Yeah, I got an email saying they
upgraded the system last weekend.
So this is what they upgraded?”
“Apparently. Anyway, when I got gas,
the attendant told me our local Post Office was on lockdown. It was one more Friday Irritant. I feel like an oyster.”
“WHY was our post office locked
down?”
“Seems all the post offices in the
state were on lockdown. They released our local workers to their homes at 1:30
today.”
“Well that’s good. We don’t wanna keep postal workers locked
down much past 2.”
“They locked it down – get this -- in
case the marathon bomber car-jacked a mail truck.”
“And the danger would be what, Carolyn?
He’d deliver the mail even more poorly than our driver Jan with the
wandering eye?”
His humor had returned with his newly stable mood.
Which totally went south once a befouling odor enveloped
him.
“My gawd what is that smell?”
“Oh. That.
Well. I’d been awake since
3 am so by 9:30 I was starving.
And there was no food in the house, so I had lentil soup for
breakfast. But just half a can.”
“Where is the other half? Throw it away now.”
“It’s in my Lockdown Casserole.”
As of Friday, the Marathon Terrorist Attack was responsible for mayhem and misery beyond understanding.
But it was also responsible for
napalm-like farts that caused my immune-compromised husband to stagger off ‘to go
pack up the car for New Hampshire.’
As the slider closed behind him, I
noticed nothing in his hands to pack up.
The ride up was reasonably
uneventful, with all four windows rolled down. We were exhausted for so many reasons, with just enough
energy to be grateful our children and their loved ones were safe, that we had
each other, that we had that day together. And that our pulverized hearts still held tightly to the hundreds
of families whose lives are irreconcilably broken.
We were tapped out at precisely the
right time to be in the sticks without access to news, other than texts from our kids that the
second guy was taken alive. The
lock downs, the mayhem, the manhunt.
Those parts ended.
The educator and analyst in me still struggles to make sense of all of this, but how can you make sense of a nightmare?
Meanwhile, the English teacher and
literary-device enthusiast in me did discern, albeit obliquely, one “theme” so here
it is: During our three-hour road trip last Friday, my Breakfast Lentils caused
my guts to feel like a pressure-cooker and my ass sounded like Watertown at 1
in the morning.
Given the circumstances, it’s the
best I could do.
Reminder: check this out now! http://www.theonion.com/articles/jesus-this-week,32105/
